Can RAZR2 shave stubble off Motorola?

Motorola said Friday the next generation of its hugely popular RAZR thin clamshell phone — one of the Schaumburg company’s great hopes to spark a turnaround — will be available from all major mobile phone carriers within 60 days.

RAZR2 (far right) will be available starting in the next two weeks. Tracey Thiele, Motorola spokeswoman, said that by October, the new RAZR2 will be sold by AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, the top national carriers, and Alltel and Chicago-based U.S. Cellular, the regional carriers.

The RAZR, introduced in the fourth quarter of 2004, set new standards for design, with sales since then of more than 100 million phones — an industry record — and rivals copying the thin design.

The new RAZR2 is thinner than the original: 19 millimeters vs. 21 millimeters. It has a larger, clearer and brighter internal screen, a larger external screen, new technology to tune out background noise, the ability to download songs from over-the-air services and to store several thousand songs and a 2 megapixel camera.
Thiele said each carrier will have its own take on the phone. Carriers in part competed on colors with the original RAZR. This time Verizon will offer the phone in black espresso, Sprint in pearl gray and AT&T in mahogany, Thiele said.

AT&T, which introduced the RAZR, and Verizon announced on Friday they are charging $299 for the phones with two-year contracts.

RAZR2 is part of a new product lineup, which Motorola hopes can turn around the company. Motorola, which invented the cell phone in 1973, has suffered a series of setbacks, dropping in the last quarter to No. 3 in the industry.

A single product, RAZR the First, made a difference, with buzz and market share. Will RAZR the Second save the day?

Neil Mawston, associate director of the global wireless practice at Strategy Analytics, a Boston research company, is skeptical: “The RAZR1 was a revolutionary design. The RAZR2 is evolutionary. It is an incremental improvement. We expect RAZR2 to make less of an impact than RAZR1. The timing for the RAZR2 is at least a year late. It should have been launched in 2006, when it was already clear that the life cycle for the RAZR1 was peaking.”